The Human Potential Project

Creating a New Future

As an “Energetic Change Agent,” I was really into the week 19 lesson in Maciariello’s (2014) A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership and Effectiveness. If you have not begun the journey of reading this book, let me recommend it again. This week’s lesson dealt with identifying emerging trends and how that is different from trying to forecast the future. Identifying trends concentrates on directions and patterns. We must, as leaders, discern patterns from emerging trends, and separate fads from real changes (Maciariello, 2014).

Leaders who are effective at facilitating change capitalize on emerging trends and use them to create a new future for their organizations, thus providing a competitive advantage in times of rapid change, This is proactive, not reactive! Again, as was stated in the Drucker quote, this is an exercise in “seeing the future that has already happened.” To create the future any other way is reacting rather than acting, which is what one does if one grows quickly. We need to make sure to study the trends and look for the ‘certainties’ of the future. One place to look for this is in the demographics.

One important part of change that I believe was left out of this lesson, and may be discussed in future weeks, is how some organizations ability to create the new future will be impaired by legislation and other government misunderstanding or slowness to adjust. An example is my own: education. As I look back to this year’s legislative session here in Indiana there was a lot of work around education. It is interesting to me that our House of Representatives is very pro “school choice” and innovative practices such as online education, but our Senate is not. Some of our legislation passed is helpful toward the ‘new future,’ but part of it still does not necessarily hinder practices for facilitating futuristic change, but certainly does not serve as a catalyst either.